The Prisoner

A Memoir

Hwang Sok-yong, Sora Kim-Russell

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781839760839
• eBook ISBN: 9781839760853
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject-of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.

In this capacious memoir, Hwang's life is set against the volatile political backdrop of modern Korea, a country subject to colonialism, Cold War division, a devastating war, decades of authoritarian dictatorships, a mass democratic uprising, and a still-lingering, painful division between North and South. The Prisoner moves between Hwang's imprisonment and scenes from his life-as a boy in Pyongyang and Seoul, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad-and in so doing, braids his extraordinary life into the dramatic revolutions and transformations of Korean society during the twentieth century.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Prologue
• 1. Leaving: 1985–86
• 2. Prison I
• 3. Visit to the North: 1986–89
• 4. Prison II
• 5. Exile: 1989–93
• 6. Prison III
• 7. Childhood: 1947–56
• 8. Prison IV
• 9. Lost: 1956–66
• 10. Prison V
• 11. Deployment: 1966–69
• 12. Dictatorship: 1969–76
• 13. Gwangju: 1976–85
• 14. Prison VI
• Epilogue
• About the Translators